there will flirt even with the skull if she can find nothing better
to flirt with. I cannot think that her repentance is as yet genuine, and
as for her praying there is no object in her doing so, for she does not
want anything.

3. In the next desert there is a very beautiful figure of St. John the
Baptist kneeling and looking upwards. This figure puzzles me more than
any other at Montrigone; it appears to be of the fifteenth rather than
the sixteenth century; it hardly reminds me of Gaudenzio, and still less
of any other Valsesian artist. It is a work of unusual beauty, but I can
form no idea as to its authorship.

I wrote the foregoing pages in the church at Montrigone itself, having
brought my camp-stool with me. It was Sunday; the church was open all
day, but there was no mass said, and hardly any one came. The sacristan
was a kind, gentle, little old man, who let me do whatever I wanted. He
sat on the doorstep of the main door, mending vestments, and to this end
was cutting up a fine piece of figured silk from one to two hundred years
old, which, if I could have got it, for half its value, I should much
like to have bought. I sat in the cool of the church while he sat in the
doorway, which was still in shadow, snipping and snipping, and then
sewing, I am sure with admirable neatness. He made a charming picture,
with the arched portico over his head, the green grass and low church
wall behind him, and then a lovely landscape of wood and pasture and
valleys and hillside. Every now and then he would come and chirrup about
Joachim, for he was pained and shocked at my having said that his Joachim
was some one else and not Joachim at all. I said I was very sorry, but I
was afraid the figure was a woman. He asked me what he was to do. He
had known it, man and boy, this sixty years, and had always shown it as
St. Joachim; he had never heard any one but myself question his
ascription, and could not suddenly change his mind about it at the
bidding of a stranger. At the same time he felt it was a very serious
thing to continue showing it as the Virgin's father if it was really her
grandmother. I told him I thought this was a case for his spiritual
director, and that if he felt uncomfortable about it he should consult
his parish priest and do as he was told.

On leaving Montrigone, with a pleasant sense of having made acquaintance
with a new and, in many respects, interesting work, I could not get the
sacrist